Armaged­don Time

In a 1980 inter­view on tel­e­van­ge­list Jim Bakker’s net­work, pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Ronald Regan claimed ​“We may be the gen­er­a­tion that sees Armaged­don.” He was refer­ring to con­cerns over the threat of a nuclear war, but the phrase looms large in James Gray’s Armaged­don Time (named for the Willie Williams’ reg­gae song, ​‘Armagideon Time’, notably cov­ered by The Clash) beyond the back­drop of a con­tentious pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and the advent of nuclear superpowers.

For an 11-year-old boy grow­ing up in New York City, armaged­don is: con­flict with his teacher; his father’s belt wield­ed as a weapon; and the declin­ing health of a beloved grand­fa­ther. The end of the world is con­stant­ly on the hori­zon when you’re a child, and some­times escape is a more attrac­tive option than fac­ing it.

Famil­ial dynam­ics have always been at the heart of James Gray’s film­mak­ing; with every new film comes the spec­u­la­tion it might be his most per­son­al work yet. In the case of Armaged­don Time it’s a sug­ges­tion that makes sense, giv­en that the film is direct­ly based on his expe­ri­ences grow­ing up in New York dur­ing the 1980s.

Paul Graff (Banks Repe­ta) is a stand-in for Gray, a sixth-grad­er with his head in the clouds, more inter­est­ed in draw­ing super­heroes and act­ing as class clown than school­work. He forms a friend­ship with fel­low dream­er John­ny (Jaylin Webb) who har­bours ambi­tions of work­ing for NASA and is sim­i­lar­ly penalised by their teacher, who brands him a trou­ble­mak­er seem­ing­ly for being the only Black stu­dent in their class.

Paul’s scat­ti­ness and dis­in­ter­est in school caus­es ten­sion between his fraz­zled par­ents Esther (Anne Hath­away) and Irv­ing (Jere­my Strong) who rely on the close rela­tion­ship between Paul and his kind­ly grand­fa­ther Aaron (Antho­ny Hop­kins) to get through to their younger son. Aaron encour­ages his grandson’s cre­ativ­i­ty and ambi­tion, but as ten­sions mount with­in the fam­i­ly and Paul strug­gles to nav­i­gate the rough ter­rain of ado­les­cence, dreams aren’t enough to sub­side on.

Real­i­ty is harsh, dis­rup­tive and often cru­el, and no-one feels this more than John­ny, who lives in pover­ty with his frail grand­moth­er and knows how stacked against him the sys­tem is. But for a brief few moments, the friend­ship between him and Paul presents the roman­tic pos­si­bil­i­ty of escape from every­thing they’re afraid of, name­ly par­ents, teach­ers, and expec­ta­tions about their future selves.

Repe­ta deliv­ers an out­stand­ing debut per­for­mance as Paul, bal­anc­ing youth­ful exu­ber­ance and silli­ness with a real emo­tion­al depth. He holds his own against heavy­weights such as Hop­kins, Hath­away and Strong, and the film is pow­ered by his strength and will­ing­ness to cap­ture Paul’s less desir­able traits. Paul is in many ways a very aver­age kid, but a scene in which he briefly has coun­selling at school reveals the dif­fi­cul­ty of being a boy on the cusp of ado­les­cence at a time when it was unthink­able to speak about your emo­tions, let alone under­stand them.

Com­par­isons between Alfon­so Cuaròn’s Roma and Ken­neth Branagh’s Belfast are easy to make, but Gray treats his child­hood with less rev­er­ence. While there is a great deal of humour in the film and poignant mem­o­ries sewn into the fab­ric of time (launch­ing a toy rock­et with his grand­fa­ther, skip­ping out on a school trip to play pin­ball and buy The Sug­arhill Gang’s debut album) this peri­od in Paul’s life is defined by tur­bu­lence, as he acts out at school, reck­ons with mor­tal­i­ty, and begins to realise the truths he held as self-evi­dent about his fam­i­ly might have been fairy­tales all along.

Along­side this is Paul’s blos­som­ing real­i­sa­tion of how class and race are entwined with­in Amer­i­can soci­ety. Despite dreams of mov­ing to Flori­da togeth­er, the tra­jec­to­ry of his life is vast­ly dif­fer­ent from Johnny’s, and when he is moved from pub­lic to pri­vate school, Paul is sur­round­ed by wealthy white peers whose open racism and feel­ings of supe­ri­or­i­ty are a shock to the sys­tem, but some­thing he strug­gles to reject as he tries to assim­i­late to a new social envi­ron­ment in which he – by virtue of being Jew­ish – is also seen as an outsider.

It’s a melan­choly study of child psy­chol­o­gy, and the way in which our for­ma­tive years are marked by rapid peri­ods of learn­ing and relearn­ing. Paul is grant­ed clemen­cy and allowed to make mis­takes; no such grace exists for John­ny, who realis­es the sys­tem is rigged, even if it’s nice to pre­tend oth­er­wise for a lit­tle while.

At the same time, Armaged­don Time inter­ro­gates famil­ial rela­tion­ships – those that make us the peo­ple we become – as well as how gen­er­a­tional trau­ma shapes a fam­i­ly unit. In one ter­ri­fy­ing scene, Irv­ing beats Paul for get­ting in trou­ble at school: the low cam­era angle empha­sis­es his tem­po­rary trans­for­ma­tion into a mon­ster who Paul bare­ly recog­nis­es. Sim­i­lar­ly, silence is utilised to great effect: by avoid­ing a reliance on a score or musi­cal cues, Gray negates slip­ping into mawk­ish territory.

John­ny is ulti­mate­ly betrayed at the point when it mat­ters most, with Paul reject­ing his grandfather’s advice to ​“be a men­sch” and stand up for those that need it most out of self-preser­va­tion. There’s no abso­lu­tion for the young child, who has to live with the guilt of what he did to his friend, and the real­i­sa­tion that the hard thing and the right thing are often the same.

This ele­ment of the sto­ry is its most thorny: film­mak­ers have been mak­ing art about their white guilt for decades and the mer­its of this are few, but Gray’s film avoids that sort of unpro­duc­tive hand-wring­ing through its stark­ness. There’s no les­son or moral at the end of this sto­ry, no hap­pi­ly-ever-after or faux-inspir­ing Green Book-style coda. The mis­takes we make as chil­dren have the pow­er to echo through our lives, and we have to live with them, for bet­ter or worse, and only dis­tance pro­vides clar­i­ty. Armaged­don Time under­stands the past is a for­eign coun­try, and not one you can live in forever.